In the US political, intellectual, and popular discourses of the 1990s, "the Balkans" emerged as a troubling Eastern European site that revealed a disturbing underside of the generally optimistic beginning of the post-Cold War era. In this context, the "Balkan" attribute in fact became a shorthand for a variety of post-Yugoslav phenomena revolving around the wars in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo and the specter of multiple international community interventions in the region. Almost fifteen years later, "Balkan studies" in the US still bear a heavy imprint of "foreign policy" debates on intervention.

Many area studies centers at US universities continue to stress concerns with the dynamics and costs of political involvement ("the international community has spent upwards of $200 billion trying to bring peace, stability and economic development to southeastern Europe", one prominent observer noted in January 2009) while various government officials periodically issue warnings about the persisting "instability" of the region. On the other hand, a number of critical voices within the American academia (Todorova, Wolff, Bakic Hayden, et al.) have both exposed the severe shortcomings of such approaches (including their accompanying conflation of "Balkan" and "Yugoslav" labels) and made it possible to revitalize the state of Balkan studies in the US.

My paper charts these developments, focusing on the convergence of research and policy concerns in the US-based Balkan studies since the 1990s and also discussing the ways that emerging transnational connections, perspectives, and bodies of critical literature have enabled thorough reconsideration (and to a certain extent abandonment) of the policy centered approaches.